if i get scared i'll just call you

Don't touch anything. Seriously. Because chances are whatever you'd touch, even that mouse and keyboard in front of you, is made of plastic, and it's becoming clear that plastic is bad for you because of a magic ingredient known as bisphenol. I'm not sure how anybody is surprised by this, but there it is. I'll call this good news, because if it's bad enough that we really need to worry about it, then what this news story says is that we are starting to worry, and I'm naive enough to believe that something might eventually be done about it. If it's not anything we need to bother ourselves with, it'll stay relegated mostly to local news "special reports" along with the dangers of lesbian gangs, dvd pirates, and wild dogs in our shopping malls (stay tuned to find out why your next visit to the fitting room could be your last).

Coincidentally, Radiohead were griping about the dangers of plastic years ago, although their concern was polyethylene rather than bisphenol. Back in the late 90s when www.radiohead.co.uk was brilliant and ill-maintained and featured comic strips that ended with panels that bore captions such as "I am lying on the floor like that when the police finally find me", they had a few pages devoted to the dangers of polyethylene. If all this doomsaying is true, and I don't have a hard time believing that it is, then are there really any "safe" chemicals at all in plastics? Are there any safe plastics, period?

For the record, I think that on balance plastic is a good thing, and I'm sure many volumes could be written on its contributions (in many cases life-saving) to modern life. It has also been around a long time and plenty of people have lived full and healthy lives despite its ubiquity, so how bad can it be? Furthermore, without the potential dangers of the stuff, there would not have been occasion for the creation of "Polyethylene [Parts 1 & 2]" by Radiohead.

But that's not to say I won't think about this latest news the tiniest bit the next time I'm sucking down some nice cold Propel after a hard bicycle ride.